Name Awards

A strong name alone is not enough. Garmin out muscles Trimble.

For many years, Trimble Navigation believed that all the other GPS startups would not assail their strong initial lead in the industry, because, after all, they had the powerful name Trimble. And they were right in one regard. Trimble is a great name for a company completely involved in navigation equipment.

The problem of being the leader, of course,  is that everyone is shooting for you. And it is easy to get complacent when you have held off assaults from many of the Japanese giants. But sometimes there is still another startup out there that is smarter, hungrier or more agile. I think this was the case with Garmin’s meteoric rise to success. It surely wasn’t the power of their brand name, since no one had heard of them anyway. Besides which, what does Garmin mean and where did it come from?

I hear people talking affectionately of their little Garmin as a favorite adult toy. Almost like their little pet. Not for one moment do they stop to realize that Garmin International was founded by Gary Burrell and Min Kao, and the name is from their two first names! It used to mean nothing. Now it is the brand shorthand for a whole category of GPS devices in high volume usage around the world.

A descriptive sentence or a name?

Now the one language I know absolutely nothing about is Vietnamese, but many of us in Silicon Valley have followed the controversy over naming a local business district Little Saigon. The fact that there is already such an area in Southern California (and perhaps elsewhere in USA) is beside the point. The name stirs up lots of emotions and has become the downfall of a city official here in San Jose.

More interesting for me is the name of businesses popping up in and around this area. Other than the ones with Pho in part of their title (and a picture of noodles nearby) I have no idea what their names mean. But when I read the legal notices in the local Metro paper (something only a namer nut would do at lunch time), I have a hard time believing this is a good name for a new business: Hoi Cong Huong Soc Trang Bac Cali.

What a long name, especially for an Asian language that tends to have shorter words. Can you imagine answering the phone here? I am surprised it even fit on the county name registration form. I don’t know what it means. I do know they will abbreviating it by the second week. It is long enough to be the name of some quasi government organization name, just like we have in English names of the form The International Society and Brotherhood of Metal and Glass Workers Union.

When your name is longer than your tagline or elevator pitch, you know you have a big branding and marketing problem.

The new shape of solar. The new shape of naming.

The quarterly venture capital survey came out this past weekend, and at first I thought we had finally seen the end of strange Web 2.0 names, but then I found Booyah and Fitbit and Chegg on the list. So the trend continues.

But more interestingly for us, the company that raised the most money (by far) in the quarter, was Solyndra. Over $200million. Wow. Well, they are changing the shape of solar “panels” and it must be working.

Yesterday a prospect told me how many naming agencies hung up the phone on her because she was a small startup business. Imagine how dumb we would have been if I had hung up the phone on a solar startup that didn’t even have offices yet. Yes, today that company is called Solyndra and they are proving there is plenty of money out there for companies with great new technology. And I hope they are in some small way showing you can still name your solar startup without having the word solar specifically in your name – and without a big initial branding budget.

Adobe Complicated Systems 4

After coffee with a friend the other day, I realized it wasn’t just me. Many other professionals, but not graphics design professionals, are overwhelmed by Adobe‘s CS offerings. Now on version 4, there are 6 boxes to choose from…. and that is just the start. Unless you make your living as a design professional, these are probably way out of your price league. And they are also way more complex than the standard tools needed to be a happy web designer.

So that is why we think CS stands for Complicated Systems. Don’t touch it is our advice unless you really need those tools. Starting out making websites or doing photo editing? Or even just a serious amateur or part-time professional? Then get an older version of Dreamweaver… I still run version 3 on some of the websites I maintain. And forget the new Photoshop. For most of you the free Paint.net program will let you edit all those digital camera pictures to your heart’s content.

Adobe software used to be for all of us. Now they are obviously only chasing the high-end designers. One day they will realize there are a lot more commoners than royalty, but by then it will be too late. In the meantime, they usually do a great job on their product names and naming heirarchy… just not on the packages.